MARCIA HAFIF (1929–2018)
Marcia Hafif, whose meditative, abstract canvases often questioned the very practice of painting, has died at age eighty-nine. In addition to painting, the artist’s six-decade career encompassed drawing, photography, film, and sound installation. Since the early 1970s, Hafif’s experimental work has earned her a large audience in the United States and Europe, which only grew as she continued examing color and the materiality of painting in her final years, when she began receiving increased institutional recognition for her art.
Born Marcia Woods in Pomona, California, in 1929, she studied at Pomona College from 1947 to 1951 before she married Herbert Hafif. After working as an assistant at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1961, she resettled in Rome for eight years. For her first solo exhibition at Galleria La Salita in 1964, Hafif displayed her “Pop-Minimal” paintings. Critics scoffed at the “American size” of the works, likening them to traffic signs hung on the wall of a driving school. “It never occurred to me that I could not succeed in painting on the basis of being a woman,” she recalled later in life. “Painting was painting, as math was math.”
Upon her return to California in 1969, Hafif explored her interests in other media at the University of California, Irvine, where she earned her MFA. She moved to New York City and returned to painting in 1971, at a moment when the medium’s authority was waning. Around this time, Hafif began making her Pencil on Paper drawings, pieces of paper covered with short vertical marks that eventually led to her pioneering “color study” paintings. These include her series “Extended Gray Scale,” 1972–73, which comprises 106 monochrome canvases of various gradations between black and white.
In 1978, an essay Hafif had been writing for four years was published in Artforum with the title “Beginning Again.” A rumination on painting—her own as well as that of her peers—and its “death,” the essay proved influential in its provocative investigation of a medium “under erasure,” a phrase she borrowed from Jacques Derrida. The essay, in its emphasis on rediscovery, helped ignite the discourse around conceptual painting that she sensed was missing. “If one phase of this period of analysis is coming to an end, we may be ready to enter still another phase of abstraction, a synthetic period,” she wrote.
Hafif, who divided her time between the East and West Coasts, showed her work throughout the United States and Europe. Recent exhibitions include “Marcia Hafif, The Inventory: Painting” at Laguna Art Museum in California (2015) and “Marcia Hafif: The Italian Paintings 1961–69” at Fergus McCaffrey in New York (2016). The latter was reviewed by Prudence Peiffer in Artforum’s summer 2016 issue. “We don’t move, but the works bring our focus in by degrees,” wrote Peiffer of Hafif’s abstractions. “This is no small power.”
